My commute can sometimes feel like "carmegeddon". Chicago is an enormous city filled with people who would rather not rely on its shady, often unreliable public transportation system. And so even our expressways fill up with cars. Fly over the city during rush hour and you'll see a six-lane highway completely coagulated. It becomes a fact of living here. I avoid driving during peak hours when I can.

L.A. just experienced their own "carmegeddon" when the city shut down a major highway for repairs, forcing traffic to run on alternate roads. While Chicago's public transit is faulty, it's at least workable. L.A., on the other hand, is almost exclusively a driving city. It's a giant network of highways, a tangle of roads. From what I gather, if you live in L.A. you have a car or you live with someone who does. So a major highway shutdown obviously did lead to some traffic complications for the thousands of drivers who depend on their own vehicles to get to work.

In an effort to capitalize on the clogged highway doom, Jetblue offered a wild promotion: $4 intracity commuter flights from Burbank to Long Beach. Because if you can't contribute to the L.A. smog with your car, you'd better hop on an even less fuel-efficient vehicle during your morning commute. Cute, Jetblue. What a wasteful little stunt. One Slate writer similarly mocked the company's philandering, postulating that a cyclist could make the same trip in a shorter amount of time. And one group of cyclists decided to try to prove him right.

The Wolfpack Hustle is a bunch of dudes dedicated to riding bikes in a car-dominated city. They promote bike safety, visibility, and culture where most people are content to drive. And last week, they set out to race a commercial jet from one edge of Los Angeles to the other. 

They got a little love from Santa Monica Airlines Skateboards. General Manager Anthony Converse, a dedicated advocate of alternative transportation and a cyclist himself, wanted to give the Wolfpack Hustle some extra incentive to beat out Jetblue. He got himself a Twitter account and tweeted that he would personally pledge $100 for every minute the cyclists came out ahead by. The race was on.

Converse was probably expecting to part with $500, maybe a grand tops. It had to be a close race, even with airplane delays and other complications. Planes are a little fast. Cyclists, it turns out, are a little faster. The cyclists left first. The flight was delayed by 90 minutes. The cyclists arrived at Long Beach over an hour before the plane touched down. And Converse found himself out $7000.

That's not exactly pocket change for the GM of a small skateboarding company. But Converse was a man of his word. He sought to make good on his pledge even though he didn't have the cash on hand. He started looking to his possessions, seeing which of his belongings he could sell to make up the sum. He dug up some valuables and loaded them into his car when he realized he had been planning on driving to the pawn shop. 

“I looked at my car and said ‘just sell THAT’," he said. "This whole event was about alternative transportation. My company has a van I use, so my car was redundant.”

And so, sticking to the pledge, he sold off the car to donate $7000 to The LA County Bicycle Coalition. Talk about sloughing excess. Not only has Converse shifted resources to promoting alternative transportation, but now he's one less driver on the busy streets of L.A. People can talk green all they like, but that's some tangible activism right there.